What hot questions? There are two kinds and for all we know they may share the same hotness formula or have two different formulae. One is the "hot tab" of each site, the other is the "pan-SE hot questions tab" in the "StackExchange" popup in the top-left of every page (which doesn't seem to have a URL but rather is only accessible by JavaScript).
– hippietrailDec 8 '11 at 16:06

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This question referred to the 'hot' tab on Stack Exchange sites. This question was asked 2-1/2 years ago in July '09, when there was no pan-SE functionality. And, no, I don't know if they use the same algorithm or not.
– Robert Cartaino♦Dec 8 '11 at 16:28

Note that I do not weight an accepted answer very heavily. This is intentional, as I feel accepted answers are a fine social contract, but not necessarily a good data point for question or answer quality.

Could you change the log to log10 (logarithm to the base 10) or the equivalent in the language you've implemented it in? That will decrease the weighting given to question views by a factor of ~2.3 Right now it's heavily skewed towards more views than quality (votes)
– Lorem IpsumAug 18 '11 at 16:42

Does this cover both the per-site hot list and the pan-SE hot list? the latter seems to take into account how young or small a site is, at least during beta.
– hippietrailDec 8 '11 at 16:08

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I don't quite follow the quoitient. Doesn't that penalise recently updated questions? Or is that the point?
– PureferretJan 18 '12 at 18:36

How would all of that criteria, ie views, score, updated, differ from the activity sort? How is sorting on activity different from sorting on hot... Is a "hot" question one that simply has a lot of activity over a short amount of time?
– reectrixFeb 14 '14 at 0:15

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Is there any way to make a query in order to get the hot questions in the data explorer (data.stackexchange.com)?
– lenoMar 12 '15 at 14:58